Re: [gentoo-dev] Migrate to Phabricator

[Jonas Jelten]

On 2016-04-18 15:10, Kent Fredric wrote:
> On 18 April 2016 at 23:44, Jonas Jelten <jj@××××××.net> wrote:
>> especially to dump bugzilla.
>
> Dumping bugzilla at this time would be a regression really. "Lets just
> discard millions of bugs and their history and important context" is
> not really an option for a web accessible opensource project with lots
> of inbound links, some of which are stashed in git commit messages,
> and are essentially unfixable.

I was more thinking of a migration so all tickets and all history is
preserved of course. One could even implement a redirector that still
accepts the bugzilla links but forwards to the migrated new ticket.

>
>> It provides a tightly coupled set of project management tools. https://phacility.com/phabricator/
>
> I tend to find "tightly coupled" a synonym for "fragile" and "Inflexible".
>
> If there was a way for somebody to informally set up a phabricator
> instance in a non-committal manner
> that could be used merely for review purposes, that'd be nice.

I'm pretty sure that works. As far as I understood the setup, one can
disable any component without being fragile. I'm not sure what you mean
by inflexible, I'm just guessing that each tool does what it promises
and can interact with others nicely, and you just pick those you want.

Of course the wiki/documentation module is not useable for us as we have
the mediawiki.

We can enable more and more components over time, starting with the code
review thingy first if it works out.

>
> But "lets change to this cool new thing because its cool" is something
> that doesn't resonate with me.
>
> To 'Change' It has to be _proven_ useful for our usecases, and
> _proven_ to be _better_ than what we have, not dubious, tenuous and
> relatively unknown.
>
> I'd want to be personally comfortable with using it before I ever
> voted in favour of gentoo changing to it.
>
> And I'd expect all other devs to require that same high standard.

Agree'd. The first step might be setting up an instance that can somehow
sync all the status from ongoing work. Then people can play around and
try whether it fits their workflows.
However I'm not sure how comfortable and easy this is to accomplish.

>
> Also: I Hold defacto reservations about anything written in PHP, due
> to both personal history with PHP, and the significant number of PHP
> projects with both atrocious code and glaring security defects.

That is a point, not sure if bugzilla does any better though ;)
Still, I can't say how good their code is, I've just used the result and
it was impressing.


>
> So I would want to be sure that not only is it better than what we
> have, but it is _at least_ as secure as what we have, and I'd want to
> be assured that the development team of Phabricator are competent and
> its not just yet-another-fly-by-night product.

If blender and wikimedia switched to it, it might actually have some
benefits. Which should not mean we follow blindly, but we should
consider its usability bonus.

>
>
>> Migrating would contradict the apparent goal of integrating github more tightly,
>
> I have no idea where this "apparent goal" came from: "tight" github
> integration is not and has never been "on the table".
>
> Github is purely a voluntary auxiliary process intended to allow
> people to augment their workflow in semi-useful ways, and then, some
> of the things github provides is harmful ( Githubs inability to handle
> rebased pulls makes people do horrible long merge commits )
>
> Its been repeatedly stated that Github must never be "Relied upon" in
> a mandatory way, because it is inherently proprietary and usurps all
> the authority that Gentoo infra have, and puts the Gentoo organisation
> at Githubs mercy, and this would be entirely unconscionable as the
> "only pathway".
>

I'm fully aware of that, what I'm trying to say is that many of github's
features are present in phabricator, which would make us more
independent again. Which does not mean I hate github and wanna leave it
etc, just that phabricator can give us another, self-hosted contribution
plattform.